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Thursday, February 5, 2009

Twitter grows by 752% in 2008!

(Personally, I attribute all of this to Shaquille O'Neal being on Twitter.)

What's also of note is that Facebook is quickly closing the gap between itself and Myspace. Myspace seemed to be all the rage down south of the 49th Parallel, but it never caught on as much here in Canada. For example, I've never owned a Myspace account, but I've been on Facebook since it was only available to university students. I think the only time I've used Myspace was when I was told to check out some indie bands' page to demo some of their music.

It appears that now, the social media tide is turning even in the United States. I think I can attribute this to Facebook not being as ugly as Myspace. I've seen some pretty dreadful Myspace accounts in my day.

Back to Twitter...

I think it's pretty neat that Twitter has grown so much. But now people are really going to have to be smart about how they use it. There's just so much junk tweets that clog up and obscure the useful and insightful ones. I recently stopped following a friend because he'd set up his X-Box with Twitter or something and every time he played a video game I got an update. It was annoying, and he rarely updated with anything else. (Sorry, Dominic.)

But Twitter can be really, really useful... if a lot of your friends are using it, and they know how to use it. I have some friends who live way off in faraway lands (Vancouver) who are on Twitter with a hundred of their friends, coworkers and relatives. They can check Twitter for any important update. Phones? Thing of the past! Whereas over here, I am only following and being followed by about a dozen regular Twitterers, and I never go there for truly critical information.